


viol[et]/[ence]/[ent]

by nimiumcaelo



Series: Flowers Grow Where the Garden Meets the Wood [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: POV Mike Wheeler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 08:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimiumcaelo/pseuds/nimiumcaelo
Summary: "The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human."Victor Hugo





	viol[et]/[ence]/[ent]

**Author's Note:**

> Again, POV Mike

You are dandelion careful with the butterfly wing that is him and you do not wish him to recognize it. He has felt the pity of too many recently to accept yours with anything less than fatal resignation. To hide it, you remind him of the wolves that step heavily in your sneakers and the eagles that wear your sweaters. He remembers and is frightened again.

 

Holding yourself back from the roar of your affections, you somehow create trails through his overgrown grass skin and lean the back of your head against his old tree trunk shoulder. Softly, very softly, his fingers climb the curls in your hair like boulders and you pretend to be still and become the dappled sunlight he thinks you are. When you open your eyes again, his hand is gone but he is as firm as he was before. You know that you should be the sentinel – surely you are vaster and have more fortitude – yet the prickle of budding plants has you piled against him in a  gurgle of water that pools where a rock sticks up from the stream.

 

He touches you like you are the same rows of flowers and turnips that he is. Betraying good sense, your brain fuzzes as he rubs poison ivy fingers along your arms, sure to leave a rash of failed expectations behind. Feeling guilty, you remind him of the incisors and canines that hide behind your affable grin and he removes the leaves of his hands from your tingling skin. The rash does not come, but that gives you no comfort.

 

His retreat does not stop your creeping out into the sunlight of his clearing. Coming out from under your own tree branches and stepping into his trimmed underbrush to bird-feathers resting on the tips of his ears, you are reminded of why you came to meet him in the first place. Touching this piece of his elbow or that section of his shin makes you wonder how Adam and Eve could have destroyed an Eden this beautiful.

 

Slowly, so slowly, the air grows cool with your chilled limbs swinging against his as you grow with each other like vines on the same branch. Your head hits the ground at the same time that his does and you each have different constellations winking behind your irises. He smiles in robin-blue eggshells and dainty violets springing underfoot and you toss yourself away from the wolves and become his dappled sunshine, despite the moon rising above you.

 

Breathing heavily as you run and he chases you in an amusing inversion (you are certainly the predator, after all), you arrive at the fissure of your two beings – twin streams of different colors mixing into the same river. He pulls back from you and you feel wilderness again; he pulls back from you and you are wolves. The dragonflies twitching in his shoulders betray his eagerness to leave you, or so you assume.

 

You turn and head back towards your moss and stones and rough peeled bark.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments/suggestions/requests are always welcome and appreciated. :)
> 
> \- M


End file.
